Can't wait for the Italian, Persian, Swedish, and Indonesian contents for the next four DLCs.
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HoI4 Dev Teasers (previously Podcat's Twitter Teasers)
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I agree, looking in the game so are Finland (and Sweden) considered Plains or Forrest and that doesn't really make justice for the difficult terrain in many areas. Looking at the Plains area in Finland using Google Maps so does it look more like 90% forrest. Sure, that means that there are fields to move on, but you can't really march your troops on the fields without controlling the forrests around you without getting cut down by machineguns. A lot of the plains should really be forrests.
Then there are the issue that the forrests in Finland (and northern Sweden) are not the same as central European forrests as most are also Marshes. Changing most Finnish (and norhern Swedens) Forests to Marshes would make it a lot harder for Russia to attack.
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Some provinces could probably do with becoming forests and marshes, yeah. Finland in her modern, post-1947 borders is the 6th most swampy country in the world. Particularly Northern Finland is swampy, with 65% of the country's swamps being there. If I'm not mistaken, this "swamp belt" extends into Northern Sweden as well.
Here's a map of Northern Finland in modern borders with swamps and how much they make up of the land area. The data is from 1960, but shouldn't be much different to the 1930s-40s or indeed to today.
What I particularly had in mind though, was a more general assessment of Finland, particularly the approaches into the country where most of the fighting took place historically.
Here's the Karelian Isthmus again, with fortification lines from the Continuation War highlighted. Quick note here: barring the Salpa Line, most of the fortifications were badly under construction by mid-1944. The VKT Line, where the Russians were stopped in June-July 1944, for example existed in practice only on the map, with only very limited fortification work having been done on it by then.
As you can see, the Isthmus is a bottleneck, and the large amount of rivers and lakes limits the movement of attackers. The Vuoksi river for example forms a natural barrier where the Finns held during the entire Winter War and in the last months of the Continuation War, and the VKT Line, over half of it on the Vuoksi, while not fortified, was geographically the most defensive out of the three lines on the Isthmus.
Here's most of Ladoga Karelia. As you can see it's not a bottleneck wedged between the sea and a giant lake in the same way the Isthmus is, but it is one in other ways: limited infrastructure. The comparatively few roads in the region tied the Russians to them, limiting mobility, allowing for much smaller forces to contain, even pocket them (e.g. the Lemetti motti, visible on this map from my earlier post). The Finns, who could ski and were generally far more adept at forest warfare than the Red Army, were much more mobile and less tied to the roads.
EDIT: The lakes and rivers in Ladoga Karelia of course also created local bottlenecks.
North of that it only gets worse, with a whole lot of forest and few roads. In the Winter War the Russians were crazy enough to attack from the width of the entire eastern border. Turns out sending entire divisions, mechanised divisions at that, in the middle of nowhere, tied to a single dirt road, isn't exactly the best of ideas. Battles like Suomussalmi and the Raate Road were the result.
Had the Russians gotten past the frontier regions and into the inland of the country, the terrain and infrastructure wouldn't have improved for them much. Take a look at this map, it outlines the main roads, railroads and the bigger lakes of Finland and East Karelia.
Not the kind of region where one can execute large armoured manoeuvres like on the steppes of the Ukraine.
Come think of it, maybe they should add another terrain type to represent areas with a ton of lakes too small to represent on the map, similar to what they did by adding the fjords and archipelagos sea zone type, because making them marshes isn't really accurate. I'm talking about areas that could hold a lot of tanks, aren't quite marshes as a whole, but had a lot of lakes, restricting the manoeuvrability of forces, vehicles in particular. Areas like the Karelian Isthmus, and honestly most of Finland.
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But what about the long border north of the historical fighting? Soviets have enough units (12 divisions IRL) to line some of them along that border when they invade. Wasn't there only like 25% (2 divisions) of the army spread along this border? The rest (6 divisions) in Karelia?
Even if you are willing to accept the loss of Petsamo (ie plains terrain), you'll still need alot of units to cover the border, even though its forests. Are you counting on the Soviet lack of supply to limit the attackers? Wouldn't an abstraction of it being impassable better represent the situation?
To the point about where the historical fighting was, if north of that lake is mostly impassable, it would appear possible for Finland to bleed the Soviets along the limited front.
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Do you mean this thread? https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...n-war-be-featured-in-the-next-update.1476533/
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I recommend using thumbnails so the images don't come out huge.
In the Winter War there was fighting all across the border. The whole 105 day war saw the Red Army commit 56 divisions, 5 armoured brigades, 3 light armoured brigades, 3 airlanding brigades, 1 infantry-machine gun brigade, 1 ski brigade, 1 marine brigade and numerous separate regiments, battalions, etc., as well as 4 Finnish Democratic Republic "divisions", which were of various sizes, some in reality only regiment-sized. All in all close to 2M men, almost 5k aircraft and over 6.5k tanks. Ironically it's among the largest wars in Russian history but scarcely a thing is known about it in Russia today. But moving on.
I haven't yet calculated all similar statistics for the Continuation War, but the Soviet manpower figure in that war is similar to the above, though perhaps closer to 1.5M. That war too saw fighting across the entire frontier, but the Russian 1944 offensive focused on the south. There was a later operation called the Petsamo-Kirkenes offensive that saw the Red Army attack the Germans in parts of Northern Finland and Northern Norway.
To answer your question: I believe currently the best way to simulate the lack of roads, i.e. avenues of attack for most bigger formations, is indeed to use impassable territory. It's exactly what I've done in my Finland mod*.
I've ran quite a few tests on the Winter War with an AI SOV in my mod, and what the AI likes to do is stack some 150+ divisions and endlessly attack until it de-orgs your defence. It also barely has tanks and doesn't use its air force intelligently or in any way similar to how the real Red Army used it in the war (not that the VVS was very effective in the real war either, but it did bomb Finland every or almost every day of the war). In general the Winter War is just very badly represented in the game, even with things like impassable territory. The same is true for the Continuation and Lapland Wars if they're modded into the game (currently vanilla omits them entirely!).
*I had to make a couple of provinces that were impassable in HoI3, but not IRL, impassable in the mod too because you simply can't defend all that was defended historically, not even ahistorically with entire divisions. IRL the provinces in question saw a Russian division or two attack during the Winter War and they were halted for the entire duration of the war by a very small Finnish force, only a couple of battalions or so. If you check this map I posted previously, it's the Inari-Ilomantsi area that I'm talking about.
Also I realise at this point this topic should probably be moved to a thread of its own, so if you want to continue, feel free to make one.
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I almost mentioned yesterday that this kind of useful info buried in this thread might not be the best place for it - a suggestions thread (if you don't already have one) for better terrain in the area could well be worth posting (and if you do already have one, link it so we can give it some upvotes
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Here comes the weekly Necromancer to revive this post.
What diaries are we still missing? Modding, AI improvement, Achievements, Music/Art. What else?
Arheo sadly releases the teasers much later in the evening, unlike Podcat, so I guess we will still have to wait some hours for a teaser...
What diaries are we still missing? Modding, AI improvement, Achievements, Music/Art. What else?
Arheo sadly releases the teasers much later in the evening, unlike Podcat, so I guess we will still have to wait some hours for a teaser...
You can cast raise dead if it's been less than a week, no need to turn to necromancy. Sure the thread takes a -1 but it's not that important to the party's combat dynamic.
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Possible an additonal Bag of Tricks, but that looks like it. Release info should be coming soon(-ish) possibly.
If this means what I think it means, release not far off (a minimum of a month, and at most two months). Pumped. Still would love an actual ETA for release so I can plan financially.
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Sounds to me like they are wrapping up all the stuff, like a summary - which means no more features, release should be quite soon. Hopefully!
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No more new features, they could spend another month touching up and rebalancing the features that going to be added.
Maybe it's just the final button for the Scorched Earth tactics - cause the old one was just a placeholder.
Maybe they balanced it a bit more and will also talk about it tomorrow?
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I can assure you all that the release will take place in November. This is quite logical and I think many of you have already guessed about it.
The test branch in Steam is often updated, and if you look at the previous updates, then this happens exactly one month before the release of the update. Coupled with the fact that we have reached the AARs, we can state with absolute accuracy and seriousness that the release of the DLC will take place in mid-late November. In most cases, updates were released on Thursdays. Thoughts?
The test branch in Steam is often updated, and if you look at the previous updates, then this happens exactly one month before the release of the update. Coupled with the fact that we have reached the AARs, we can state with absolute accuracy and seriousness that the release of the DLC will take place in mid-late November. In most cases, updates were released on Thursdays. Thoughts?
I think they have finalised the graphics, and that is indeed the scorched earth icon.
